Firewire is still expensive to implement if you're doing it yourself - ie, not buying a PC card manufactured in the hundreds of thousands - also, the bus architecture of the SA1100 doesn't have any external DMA, which isn't helpful (you get DMA to internal peripherals only).

It's not really needed, either. The PC software does all the transfers at once - you do all the mods to the player (add, delete, etc) then click sync and have a coffee. After the initial loading of the player with loads of stuff, you're usually just maintaining the collection - adding new tunes as you get them, etc, so huge bandwidth isn't needed.

Hugo